The Cloister Walk (34 page)

One prioress sent me a tape of a talk she'd delivered to her community, and when she spoke of what she termed “sins against celibacy” it was not sexual acts that concerned her so much as emotions. “Celibacy is not an excuse for being unhappy or uncharitable, to stuff feelings down, to become angry, or an iceberg,” she said. “The worst sin against celibacy,” she told the sisters, “is to pretend to not have any affections at all. To fall in love is celibacy at work,” she said, adding, in a remark that drew a knowing laughter from the women present, that “most of us should have fallen in love twenty times or so by now.” Her remark was by no means a license for the sisters to run out and have affairs. It was an honest, realistic assessment of human sexuality as celibates experience it. As was clear from what she said next, she was confirming the religious context in which monastics seek to place their affective experience. “Celibacy is not a vow to repress our feelings,” the sister told the group. “It is a vow to put all our feelings, acceptable or not, close to our hearts and bring them into consciousness through prayer.”

When celibacy goes wrong with men, it often makes headlines. Although women's religious communities have had sexual abuse suits brought against them in recent years, their failures at celibacy have generally not been as public. Several sisters told me they felt this is in part because men and women celibates define their celibacy in different ways. “The men,” one said, “tend to define it as not having sex; they want to use that energy to serve the church. They're more clinically oriented. And when they overcompensate for being celibate, it's through food, alcohol, sports, or work.” She felt that women tended to see celibacy as more an issue of communal living, and would discuss it more in terms of “a way to govern affective relationships.” She said, “We women can also lose ourselves in work.” But, she added, “the worst thing that we do is to deny our true feelings and become rigid, afraid to relate. We distance ourselves from both men and women.”

Several sisters spoke to me about emotional frigidity as a maladaptation that celibate women especially are prone to. “It seems a distorted image,” one sister said, “of the nurturing quality that to me is so much at the heart of our identities as women.” I suspect that many of the horror stories people tell about nuns in the parochial schools of the 1950s are about women who adapted to celibacy by closing up their emotions and refusing to love. As one sister said to me, “I'm always so sad to experience women who are not loving people, but they've been celibate their entire life. To be celibate, it seems to me,” she added, “means first of all being a loving person in a way that frees you to serve others. Otherwise celibacy has no point.”

For the women I talked with, deep and enduring friendships seemed to provide a healthy channel for their affections. They saw friendship not merely as a safety valve, however, but as having a profoundly religious dimension. One sister said, “Unless we're open to the gift of friendship, allowing ourselves to be loved and to really love in return, only then can we know what it might be to have God love us and to love God. I really believe that the experience of love is the only teacher of love.” Although being open to friendships and to “falling in love” has obvious danger for celibates, and most of the women felt that wrong moves and mistakes were inevitable, one said that “I am less inclined to name them mistakes and believe that they are genuine experiences of growth, of learning how to be a celibate.”

Monastic women do sometimes suffer from their own naivete, and from the fact that most monastic formation programs, at least until recently, gave short shrift to the issue of celibacy. The remark of one sister is typical: “We were pretty much left on our own to work it out, because sexual matters simply were not discussed.” A former prioress who said much the same thing about her own days as a novice, added, “I now see that this was utterly foolish, considering that celibacy is something that has to be formed in us. It is not a simple part of our monastic vow, but a part of the long conversion process that lasts a lifetime.”

Loneliness is one of the issues that all the women said had to be faced in learning to be a celibate. A sister who works in formation said, “That's a big part of adjusting to life in a monastic community, to sit and face your loneliness, your emptiness, and not let distractions turn you from the task. If a young sister comes to me and says that she's been masturbating, the question I want her to address is: Why? Why now? Is she lonely? Is this a pattern she's establishing? Has there been some major event in her life—the death of a friend or family member, or an experience in the monastery that's left her feeling alienated? Is she infatuated with someone, and using this as a way to find sexual release?” The latter situation, the sister said, “makes me rejoice. If she's falling in love, then she has an opportunity to grow past the romantic image of what it means to be a nun. I know this from my own experience. The questions she'll need to ask herself, if she wants to remain a nun, are: How does Christ's love show through this person she loves? How can she best show her love in return—for the person, for the community, for Christ? Chances are it's not by masturbating.”

Many sisters have said that they felt it was important for them “to be able to talk about and learn about our bodies and how they function. I do not think that ignorance is any kind of holiness.” But in the years before Vatican II, sexual ignorance was often accepted as a given for monastic woman. One sister who worked for years as an obstetrics nurse said that she chose that specialty in part because she was appalled that so many sisters had no knowledge of their own anatomy. “So much of Catholic moral teaching has to do with knowledge, intention, and consent of the will,” she said, “and these women had so little knowledge, I felt that they had no way to grasp the basics of sexual morality as their own church understood it.”

Sisters have told me of pathetic attitudes toward sex that were largely the result of such ignorance. Several mentioned being disturbed as young sisters to hear older women say things like, “Babies are so beautiful; it's too bad they come into the world in such a disgusting way.” Such an attitude would be incomprehensible to most parents, and serve only to reinforce the idea that nuns are otherworldly. It also reflects, in a most unpleasant way, the notion that virginity is equated with divinity, and that on the scale of holiness married people are inferior to those who have taken religious vows. I once heard a Benedictine woman say that gynecological exams made her feel violated, as if she'd been raped. It was not a casual remark; her whole body tensed as she said it, her disgust became physically apparent. I was stunned to think that a grown woman might not comprehend the difference between a medical exam, rape, and sexual intercourse. While she would never learn this from experience, I began to wonder if there weren't some way for her to accept on faith that sexuality could be something other than an object of fear and loathing. It seemed especially important as the sister was working as a pastoral minister, which of course meant that she was engaged on a daily basis with married people and their families. I wondered if her sexual attitudes had something to do with the fact that several parishioners had told me that they found her ineffectual as a minister, distant and cold.

As more and more sisters work as pastoral assistants and hospital chaplains, I sense a tension between the ignorance that once insulated them from the world and the demands of these new ministries. A prostitute beaten half to death by a customer should not have to explain to a hospital chaplain what a “blow job” is; it's something the chaplain should know. (Even if the chaplain's job is mainly to listen, it helps to understand the language being spoken.) When a sister working in Minneapolis, long a center of child pornography and prostitution in America, sees a copy of
Playboy
for the first time and says in shock, “Why—those are real women posing in those photographs!” she reveals a naivete that borders on the criminal. I wonder if “criminal naivete” might not be a good term to add to the lexicon of moral theology, to apply to false innocence, the ignorance of people who should know better.

I am not one of those people who think that monastics are a bunch of escapists who should all become activists in the world. I believe that a contemplative who is being with God, praying with and for the world, is doing something that is invaluable in part because it transcends utility. And my experience of praying the psalms with the Benedictines has taught me that a contemplative who knows the psalms by heart is keeping up-to-date on the evils in this world—the record of human evil and violence in the psalms will make sure of that. But when monastic people are engaged in active ministries, as some have been throughout monastic history, they can't afford a drastic ignorance of the people they teach and serve.

Benedictine women know that such ignorance can cause considerable strain for them and their own communities. “We women have not been able to avoid the hard sexual issues,” a former prioress told me. She related a story about a young sister whom she described as “terribly naive,” who was befriended by an older woman who invited her on pilgrimages to several Marian shrines. “She had no idea that anything sexual could happen,” the sister said, “and she was torn apart when it did.” The prioress added, “For us, the question is the same whether sisters are having affairs with men, or with other women. Pairing off does violence to the group. It's a little like a marriage; a good community, like a good marriage, can survive an affair, one big shock to the system. But we can't survive a lifestyle of infidelity. We have to ask sisters to discern their choices and decide: Do they want that person, or the community?”

She asked the young woman to see a counselor to help her make a decision. “But,” she told me, “the counselors saw their purpose as helping people to grow emotionally, so they promoted the relationship. They seemed to feel that it was better for her to grow through a sexual relationship than to remain a childish nun.” This raised a dilemma for the prioress. While she herself recognized the need for the woman to grow up—like many Benedictines I've talked to, men and women, she felt that monasteries have all too often provided a refuge for immature people—she was disturbed that the counselors seemed to be implying that one
can't
grow emotionally in the monastery, in celibate relationships. The prioress knew from experience that this was not true, but she felt at a loss when dealing with the counselors. I suspect she'd run up against a classic conflict between a psychology that emphasizes individual development, and the Benedictine charism of life lived in community. She was also contending with a strong cultural prejudice against celibacy. To channel one's sexuality into anything besides being sexually active is seen as highly suspect; it leaves celibates vulnerable to being automatically labeled as infantile or repressed.

One of the first things I noticed about monastic people, when I first encountered them, was that most of them were not noticeably repressed, and certainly not infantile. Over the years that I've gotten to know the Benedictines better, this first impression has been strongly reinforced. Often their struggles with celibacy have given them a truly sophisticated outlook on the subject of human sexuality, and many of their observations—for instance, that sexual stability and spiritual growth work together as a person matures—are of as much use to non-celibates as to monastics. In giving a conference on celibacy to her community, one woman said that it was extremely foolish to take celibacy, or any other aspect of sexuality, for granted. “As monastic people,” she said, “we do need to sublimate our sexual energies, but we need to be conscious about it. Otherwise we run the risk of giving in to compulsions and addictions.” She depicted the celibate as extremely vulnerable in American culture, which promotes addictive behaviors. “Celibacy, like so much in the monastic life,” she said, “is mostly a matter of paying attention. We have to be wary of anything that dulls conscious awareness, such as alcohol, or even television commercials.”

“The object of celibacy is consciousness,” she said, “taking our unconscious feelings and sexual urges and placing them where we think God wants them. Our goal is to be celibate, conscious, passionate people.” When it works, the celibate is, in the words of another sister, “stretching the ability to love, and particularly, to love non-exclusively.” The students taught by sisters have often been the beneficiaries of this. More than one sister spoke to me about the joy of being able to draw on maternal instincts, particularly with their younger students. But I believe it goes beyond that. As Sally Cline, who as a child had the odd experience of being the only Jewish girl in a British convent school, has written, “I [understood] that one of the greatest gifts the nuns gave to us, their girls, the gift of passionate attention, came from their celibate philosophy that ‘loves all' and ‘loves all well.' ”

Realizing that this was love, Cline says, was helpful in her teenage years. The nuns helped her see, she says, “that a non-sexually active love can be just as passionate and just as absorbing as a genitally rooted one, and that such a love has as its center the idea of being fully focused and intentional.” According to all the sisters I spoke with, intentionality is a major part of celibacy. But for many of them, this was not at all clear when they first sought the monastic life. “I don't think that celibacy was much on my mind at all,” one sister said. “It was certainly not what I was pursuing when I asked to join the community. It just came along as part of the deal.” Eventually, however, she realized that “it did have to become a conscious choice, and one that has to be made time and time again. It is a daily choice,” she said, “to live as a celibate.”